The Art of Poetry No. 88
“I write to find out what I think about something.”
Anne Carson
Anne Carson
Anne Carson, born on June 21, 1950, in Toronto, Canada, has, over the course of her career, combined translation, classicism, and poetry to create new forms in which to ask questions regarding such eternal themes as loss, love, and desire. A trained classicist and the recipient of a 2000 MacArthur Foundation fellowship, Carson’s first book, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay, was published in 1986. Her 1995 collection Glass, Irony, and God contains “The Glass Essay,” a lengthy meditation on desire, Emily Brontë, and the end of an affair. Allusion features prominently in Carson’s work, as does a fascination with the ancient world; 1998’s seminal Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse, takes off from the myth of Hercules, and her translations of Sappho were published in 2002. Other major works include The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (2001); Decreation, a work fusing poetry, essay, and opera (2005); Nox, an art book examining the loss of her brother (2010); and Red Doc> (2013), a sequel to Autobiography of Red.
Photo courtesy of New Directions Books
Narrative Art
From Euripides’ “The Trojan Women”
